It’s been a hard 2022 for Jews in America, and it’s only February.
In the past few weeks, we’ve had the
Colleyville hostage crisis — and the subsequent online debate about whether or not the hostage taker at the synagogue was motivated by antisemitism (no, seriously). We’ve had a Tennessee school board kicking Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning classic graphic novel “
Maus” out of its eighth grade curriculum on the pretexts of “profanity” and “nudity.”
Then, while discussing
the “Maus” situation (a book thousands more people are now going to read, so yay!),
Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of “The View,” said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust and murder of millions of Jews was actually driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said, referring to Jews and Nazis, “But these are two white groups of people.” She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”
This discourse was sometimes astute — for example, “
Jews Don’t Count” author David Baddiel pointed out that Nazi persecution of Jews was predicated on the idea of Jews as a race, and that Jews often fall victim to a phenomenon he terms “Schrodinger’s whiteness,” meaning that we are seen as white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer: “for centuries…far-right groups have seen Jews as not part of the white race,” and “on the far left, the association of Jews, which is a racist thing, with power and privilege makes them kind of super-white.” And sometimes, the discourse was utterly asinine, like when prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates elected to
randomly share with her Twitter followers that marrying a Jew brought her into a “club,” and later described that “club” by reducing all Jews to “a certain lack of reticence re. politics & social justice, high-energy, high-maintenance, hyper-protective of family, darkish sense of humor, Red Diaper baby, loved food, repeat: loved food.”
Uccch. Or, in modern speak, WTAF.
The common denominator of all of these post-Colleyville discussions is Jews, and the Jewish experience, being defined by others — whether by others’ hate, or by others’ ignorance. And frankly, it sucks.
It’s been a hard 2022 for Jews in America, and it’s only February. In the past few weeks, we’ve had the Colleyville hostage crisis — and the subsequent online debate about whether or not the hostage taker at the synagogue was motivated by antisemitism (no, seriously). We’ve had a Tennessee...
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